The Cisco® Remote Integrated Services Engine (RISE) allows both physical and virtual external service appliances to be attached to the Cisco Nexus® 7000 Series Switches and gain the same benefits as if the appliances were directly connected to the switch backplane like a dedicated service module. Cisco RISE provides a bidirectional control plane for tightly coupling network services to data center switching. Cisco RISE establishes a communication path between the network data plane and the service appliance, simplifying deployment and optimizing data paths with better traffic visibility in the data center. RISE is supported Cisco Prime NAM, Citrix NetScaler 1000v, Citrix NetScaler VPX, Citrix NetScaler MPX, Citrix NetScaler SDX etc.

Interested in knowing more about Cisco®RISE . The engineering team will showcase demos of some of the innovative features being designed for the Nexus 2K to 7K platforms. These are 15-30min Software Demos performed by our technical leaders. Please stop by our booth or visit the Nexus Data Center Whisper suites to watch the live demo and get some free goodies.Email questions to: rise-info@cisco.com

Cisco RISE can be used to tightly integrate the Cisco Nexus 7000 series switches with the Cisco Prime NAM to provide VDC awareness and SPAN traffic across multiple VDCs without burning slots on the switch. RISE overcomes the limitation of applying SPAN configuration only in the VDC to which the management cable is attached by intelligently managing the movement of NAM data ports and SPAN configuration to other VDCs as needed. The integration includes the following main features:

NAM appliance acts as a module on Nexus switches

One NAM appliance can receive traffic from multiple Nexus VDCs without re-cabling

One NAM appliance can collect interface statistics for multiple VDCs

Dynamic vdc-aware SPAN configuration on Nexus switches using NAM GUI

Up to 4 NAM ports can be automatically assigned to Nexus VDCs using NAM GUI

Graph of per-interface ingress and egress statistics for multiple VDCs

Auto-discovery and bootstrap of NAM appliance from Nexus switch

Health monitoring of NAM appliance

Visibility to multiple VDCs from one NAM appliance with ongoing VDC configuration updates

Order of magnitude OPEX and CAPEX savings: reduction in configuration, simplified provisioning and data-path optimization

Figure 1. RISE Physical and logical topology

Deployment Modes

Cisco RISE supports attachment to the NAM appliance in the following modes:

Direct Attach mode with single NAM: The appliance has a management link that is directly attached to the Nexus switch. Up to 4 data links on the NAM can be attached to one or more VDCs on the Nexus switch to send SPAN traffic (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Direct Attach Mode with single NAM

Direct Attach modes with multiple NAMs: The appliance has a management link that is directly attached to the Nexus switch. Up to 4 data links on each NAM can be attached to one or more VDCs on the Nexus switch to send SPAN traffic (Figure 3).

Figure 3: Direct Attach mode with multiple NAMs

Indirect Attach modes with multiple NAMs: The appliance has a management link that is attached via an L2 network to the Nexus switch. Up to 4 data links on each NAM can be attached to one or more VDCs on the Nexus switch to send SPAN traffic (Figure 4).

Core Features

Cisco RISE with NAM provides the following key features that allow the solution to provide traffic and performance analysis across all the VDCs on the Nexus switch without changing the wiring connections.

Data Centers are becoming increasingly smart, intelligent and elastic. With the advancement in cloud and virtualization technologies, customers demand dynamic workload management, efficient and optimal use of their resources. In addition the configuration and administration of Data Center solutions is complex and is going to become increasingly so.

With these requirements and architectures in mind we have a industry first solution called Remote Integrated Service Engine (RISE). RISE is a technology that simplifies provisioning, out of box management of service appliances like load balancers, firewalls, network analysis modules. It makes data center and campus networks dynamic, flexible, easy to configure and maintain.

RISE can dynamically provision network resources for any type of service appliance (physical and virtual form factors). External appliances can now operate as integrated service modules with Nexus Series of switches without burning a slot in a switch . This technology provides robust application delivery capabilities that accelerate the application performance manifold.

RISE is supported on all Nexus Series switches with services like Citrix NetScaler MPX, VPX, SDX and Cisco Prime NAM with many more in the pipeline.

Data traffic has grown dramatically in the recent years, leading to increased deployment of network service appliances and servers in enterprise, data center, and cloud environments. To address the corresponding business needs, network switch and router architecture has evolved to support multi-terabit capacity. However, service appliance and server capacity remained limited to a few gigabits, far below switch capacity.

Cisco Intelligent Traffic Director (ITD) is an innovative solution to bridge the performance gap between a multi-terabit switch and gigabit servers and appliances. It is an hardware based multi-terabit layer 4 load-balancing, traffic steering and clustering solution on the Nexus 7000 and 7700 series of switches.

Just prior to Interop about two weeks ago, Cisco unveiled its Remote Integrated Services Engine (RISE) on the Nexus 7000 series switch. Remote Integrated Service Engine (RISE) is a new protocol being added to the Nexus 7000 and 7700 platforms through NX-OS (software upgradeable to existing devices), that integrates external service appliances attached to Nexus 7000 Series switches with the same benefits as if the appliance was directly connected to the switch backplane, just like a dedicated service module. Initially, Citrix NetScaler Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) and the Cisco Prime Network Analysis Module (NAM) are the first services appliances that have integrated with RISE, and have been tested and Certified as “RISE-enabled”. With the announcement of RISE, we expect to develop an ecosystem of partners that will work with Cisco to take advantage of this technology, including other application services vendors and firewalls.

At Interop, I had a chance to meet up on the show floor with Citrix NetScaler Product Manager, Joe Peck, to talk about why Citrix is taking advantage of this new RISE technology.

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